Joseph "Joe" Lawrence Zachary is an American computer scientist and

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professors ...

at the

University of Utah The University of Utah (U of U, UofU, or simply The U) is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the flagship institution of the Utah System of Higher Education. The university was established in 1850 as the University of De ...

. He is known for his work in computer science education as a charter member of the

United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United Stat ...

Undergraduate Computational Engineering and Science (UCES) Project, an education initiative to improve the undergraduate science and engineering curriculum through computation. He was influential in promoting a new approach to teaching scientific programming to beginning science and engineering students.

Education and career

Joseph Zachary received his PhD in 1987, his SM in 1983, and his SB in 1979, all in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

. He started teaching at the University of Utah School of Computing in 1987. In 1999 he received the IEEE Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award for "outstanding and sustained contributions to undergraduate computational science education, including writing innovative textbooks, developing innovative online educational materials, and teaching an exemplary introductory scientific programming course". As part of his work as a charter member of the

Undergraduate Computational Engineering and Science (UCES) Project, he wrote two introductory scientific programming textbooks, the first in 1996 and the second in 1998, and developed an extensive suite of interactive courseware to accompany them. UCES later developed into the

Computational Science Graduate Fellowship The Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (CSGF) program is a highly selective graduate fellowship program sponsored by the United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of th ...

administered by the

Krell Institute The Krell Institute is a 501(3)(c) corporation located in Ames, Iowa near Iowa State University. The organization was founded in 1997 in support of the US Department of Energy's Computational Science Graduate Fellowship program (CSGF), and has si ...

. One of his assignments has appeared in the Nifty Assignments session at the SIGCSE annual meeting.

Bibliography

References

American computer scientists Computer science educators University of Utah faculty MIT School of Engineering alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people) {{compu-scientist-stub